


The Law of Conservation of Being

by Margo_Kim



Category: Thor (Movies)
Genre: Afterlife, Alternate Universe - Canon, Alternate Universe - Reincarnation, F/M, Gen, Multiple Lifetimes, Navel-Gazing, POV Female Character, Pretty Upbeat About Death, Ragnarok, Reincarnation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-23
Updated: 2014-02-23
Packaged: 2018-01-13 11:31:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,760
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1224676
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Margo_Kim/pseuds/Margo_Kim
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The world has ended, and floating outside it (speaking, as we always must in such abstract matters, purely metaphorically) was the particular dust of a particular soul. She'd died from fighting this time around. She usually does. This time it was glorious. It's usually not. That's the luck of the draw. The only things guaranteed in every cycle is that you will die, and statistically speaking you’re going to get more than a few duds. She's died tragically more often than she can count. She's also died in her sleep, and that irks her nearly as much. She's died of illness, of wound, of childbirth. She's died of old age, of disappointment, of happiness. Once she died of a combination tiger attack and arsenic poisoning in the middle of a forest fire, which the souls on the other side of life generally agreed was the best death they'd heard of in a while and not likely to ever happen again. Even in an infinite universes, some things are just too bizarre to replicate. </p><p>When next cycle she died of the exact same thing, Sif gave up trying to predict the future. A girl can only put up with being proven wrong so much.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Law of Conservation of Being

**Author's Note:**

> A fic started and finished on February 22nd in honor of Ragnarok, and sure to be edited a lot more thoroughly for dumb typos on the day after Ragnarok. Quick note on the ship tags!--Sif/Thor is a lot more off-screen and weighted than Sif/Loki by the way things ended up shaking out. But I am apparently inching ever closer to the uncomfortable and inevitable threesome, so that's something to look forward to maybe.

The world has ended, and floating outside it (speaking, as we always must in such abstract matters, purely metaphorically) is the particular dust of a particular soul. She'd died from fighting this time around. She usually does. This time it was glorious. It's usually not. That's the luck of the draw. The only things guaranteed in every cycle is that you will die, and statistically speaking you’re going to get more than a few duds. She's died tragically more often than she can count. She's also died in her sleep, and that irks her nearly as much. She's died of illness, of wound, of childbirth. She's died of old age, of disappointment, of happiness. Once she died of a combination tiger attack and arsenic poisoning in the middle of a forest fire, which the souls on the other side of life generally agreed was the best death they'd heard of in a while and not likely to happen again. Even in an infinite universes, some things are just too bizarre to replicate.

When next cycle she died of the exact same thing, Sif gave up trying to predict the future. A girl can only put up with being proven wrong so much.

Sif. She was called Sif this last cycle. She died with an axe in her gut and a smile on her lips as the stars went out one by one. Whether that was the universe or just her dying sight, she doesn't know and doesn't care. She always lives just long enough to see the stars go out. Death's not complete without it. But this time it might be the actual stars. After all, she died on the last mountain in the universe, with the last bodies in the universe. She made it all the way to the end. There's not many who can claim that. In fact, there's only five.

Of the last survivors, Hogun died first, in fire and triumph. He died with Fandral's sword in hand, and the armies of evil had shuddered and fell before him. Heimdall died next, a poison dagger in his throat. He died without fear, with triumph in his eyes. He'd done his duty all his life; he died serving only his pleasure. And Thor died next. This time, he died before Sif. She hopes she'll remember that when she finds him next. You get to take so little from one life to another, just dreams and feelings and the strangest memories that you can't ever place, until you die again and reclaim all of your lives as once, there in life's backstage as the set changes and you get ready to rush back on in a new costume. Sif hopes that she'll remember this. Remember winning. After all, she was the last person on the last mountain to die. Sif would call that winning.

(Sif hopes she doesn't remember this: Thor's rattling breath, crushed lungs, splintered ribs. The ground stained not crimson but rust underneath his prone body. Mjolnir shattered beside him. His distant eyes. He did not see her as he died. He was watching the stars go out. He'd had a peaceful heart in the end. He shouldn't have died for war. She would have surrendered victory to save him. She hopes she does not remember this.)

And Sif died last. It was the worst act of endurance she'd faced in her long, long life. She held on to life by the tips of her fingers until there was more blood outside her body than within it and still she willed her heart to beat. She would not die before her enemy.

"You're bitter to the last," Loki rasped, his head heavy on her shoulder.

"You're one to talk," she replied. There was no vitriol in either of them. The poison of their history bled out with the rest of them. Loki was worse off than she, far far worse. Heimdall's blade had nearly severed him in two. Loki's last magic trick was making it so he could speak as he died. Fitting.

He smirked with bloodless lips when she told him that. “Yes, I thought so. My last gift to you.”

“I’d rather die in silence.”

“Liar. You always loved my tongue.”

“You misunderstand what I loved it for.”

Loki laughed and spasmed and shuddered. It took quite a lot of strength to raise her hand to his face, but Sif was strong. When her fingers cupped ice-cold cheek, he stilled at the touch. Her thumb pressed against the edge of the lips she’d once known well. She hated him, she remembered that, but she remembered loving him too, and time blurs when you die. When your life flashes before your eyes, it is not a slideshow of birth to the present. It is a flash, and in it, everything. He’d always been hard to love, so much harder than Thor, but Sif had loved him anyway and for longer than she’d hated him, though both were equally well deserved. In the end, the scales tipped towards love.

“We’ve been here before,” he exhaled, his words so quiet that she almost didn’t hear them. “Do you remember?”

Sif opened her mouth to say something like, no, I don’t think we’ve ever been sitting together at the end of the entire universe before, but ( _They are alone at last._

_They've spent a few hundred centuries avoiding being so, and here they are now. It is as she’d once spat in his face—she will touch him when he is the last man in the universe. The fingers that rake themselves up her thighs are the last fingers in the universe, save for her own, tangled in his thick black hair, matted with sweat and blood. He smells like battle, like copper and iron, and it's as heady as wine. She wants to sink her teeth into his flesh and drink him dry. Maybe he knows. He shudders when her teeth scrape his throat. He's always been such a clever boy. Her tongue cleaves paths through the dirt caked on his neck, and when she reaches his mouth, she tugs his hair until his lips part, and she makes him taste his dust._

_Loki is the last man alive. Sif is the last woman. If Ragnarok has a winner, who would it be but them? If Ragnarok has come and gone and left the two of them behind, what else could they do? The last wall in the universe presses against Sif's back as Loki slams her back. She wraps her legs around his waist, and they hold each other fast. Asgard is flames around them, the smoke so thick she chokes on it. She sucks the air from Loki's lungs. She can't bear the thought of death by asphyxiation. She'd rather Loki slit her throat. By the gods, Sif has earned her bloody death._

_His nails dig into the back of her thighs. The skin breaks. The blood starts. He squeezes her legs tighter as she rocks against him, and the blood flows quicker. His hands are coated with her. What scars he'd leave if she lived. These are her first wounds in this battle, she realizes as his mouth bites down her throat. In the war of wars, the last days of living worlds, she lived to see her mother die, her father die, her shield brothers and maidens and allies die, she lived to see the sun and moon devoured, she lived to see the oceans dry, she lived to see the stars shake loose, and she lived to see the world tree wilt--all this she endured without a scratch. She fought too well. The only blood she shed was her enemies, and look at her now._

_When she bucks and throws him down, the grunt as he hits the ground is the first sound Loki's made since he found her on standing shell-shocked and frozen on the last patch of the universe. Sif herself speaks for the first time too as she straddles his hips. “We’ve lived too long.”_ ) Sif stayed silent instead. And then she said, “I think I do remember. Is that not strange?”

Loki said nothing in response. She slid down his eyelids, pushed him off her, and fell back herself. If she stretched, she could hold Thor with her left hand and Loki with her right. Instead, she drew her sword and laid it on her chest. She liked dying near her boys, she remembered that now at the end of everything, but that didn’t mean she had to get sappy about it.

The strange thing about death is that it doesn’t actually exist. You would not believe how many trillions of people have gotten that wrong. They’ll get close to the idea, mapping out heaven and breaking down the nitrate cycle, but so few take the final leap staring them in the face. There is no death. No life either, since that often has no more definition than “not dead.” Call it the Law of Conservation of Being. Existence is neither created nor destroyed. It’s changed.

And here Sif is now. Changed. In a sense, you cannot truly call her Sif anymore for that was the name of one lifetime and she is infinite now, a billion lives she has lived and has yet to live and she cannot tell the difference. But in another, far more accurate sense, call her Sif. Existence is change, but the soul is constant. She has only ever been one soul, and one life sums up the whole marvelously. She is brave and kind and strong; she is wrathful and stubborn and proud. The same ingredients can cook many recipes.

                For example:

She wakes every morning at four so she has a chance to run before the kids get up. She covers at least five miles before dawn each day. There’s the point in the curve of her trail where she stops running away from home and starts running towards it, and every morning she thinks— _go. Just go._ And every morning, she turns back to her house and showers and makes breakfast and kisses her husband before he takes the kids to school. She has three children, and though she’d never admit it aloud, she doesn’t love any of them. Her husband is a good man, and she doesn’t love him either. She’ll do her duty, but she loves that least of all. The only time she lets herself slip is when the house is at last empty in the morning, and she hears the familiar knock on the kitchen door. Her neighbor is not a good man at all, but she lets him in anyway. He’s the only mystery left in her life. She doesn’t know what to think about him except that she likes his eyes and she hates his hair and one time he told her in that sarcastic drawl of his, “I don’t think you’re cut out for a life of quiet desperation.”

The day she keeps running, she thinks about stopping by his house and grabbing him before she goes. She doesn’t. She didn’t leave one millstone to pick up another, but the memory of his eyes stays with her nonetheless. For the rest of her eventful and wonderful life, whenever she sees that particular shade of blue, she can’t help but remember the life she fled, and that is how she learns that no matter where you run, you take yourself with you.  

                For example:

Heaven had sheathed Sephael’s flaming sword long ago, but she was fairly certain that if the higher-ups spent twenty minutes with her counterpart from Hell, they’d reverse that decision. “How is it you are still alive? Surely your fellows must have tried to kill you.” she asked, fingering the silver knife beside her plate. The demon’s eyes watched her fingers lazily. He knew an idle threat when he saw it. She could not harm him here, not under the awning of the ancient peace stones. Sanctuary was one of the oldest forms of magic, and the Crossed Hands Pub was one of the oldest sanctuaries. If Sephael acted with intent to harm, she would be dust before her blow landed.

Still, it was nice to daydream.

“Demons are not nearly so much at each other’s throats as angels. We like our fellows,” replied the demon Loki. She did not know his true name, no more than he knew hers, but the name suited him well enough for he was a low creature of low intentions. She never understood why Arathor had spared him in the War of Angels. If she’d been hurt as Arathor had, she’d have torn the perpetrator to pieces with claw and wing. “If there’s ruthlessness in our blood, the fault lies with our former occupation.

“Angel is not an occupation,” Sephael spat. “Though you thinking so explains how you were weak enough to fall.”

“Fall?” His laugh was cold as the pits of hell. “Your captain threw me into the abyss.”

“Keep your lies to yourself, Serpent-tongue. It is by Thor’s mercy that you live.”

When he smirked at that, his tongue flicked out just as a human’s would not, and he smirked away when Sephael glanced away. Loki was a beautiful man, for all he was cold and cruel. No. He wore a beautiful man. There was nothing but bile underneath. Evil always wielded beauty as its shield and sword. Sephael knew better than to let beauty disarm her. She knew how to wield it herself if the need came, and demons succumb to the carnal and the base far easier than angels did. “Serpent-tongue? Have you been thinking on my tongue, Guardian Sif?”

“Of cutting it out and letting you choke on your blood.”

“You certainly are an angel of the Lord.”

“And you the filth of the pit.” The fury that sparked in the demon’s eyes at that gave Sephael a decidedly unangelic thrill. “Let’s speak of our business and then speak no more till bitter necessity compels it.”

She knew there’d be a price to pay for the quiet hatred in his eyes as he smiled at her. She’d happily pay it. Let him strike at her outside the protection of the old peace contracts. She’d bring Arathor his traitor cousin’s head on pitchfork and show him at last the meanness of the creature he’d saved.  

                For example:  

The route from Quebec to Anchorage is a hell of a drive, but Sif’s a steady hand with the truck and the best damn shot in the frozen north so she keeps her time. There’s not many truckers who can manage that these days. Sif likes that. She likes knowing her work matters, and the danger keeps things interesting (not that interesting is hard to come by in this world). It wasn’t what she’d expected out of life, sure. If you’d asked her before the outbreak, or even during it, what she planned to do with her life, her answer sure as hell wouldn’t have been ice road trucking. She probably would have joined SHIELD if she hadn’t followed Thor to Anchorage first, and hell, she probably belonged at SHIELD. But she liked trucking, much to her own surprise, and hated SHIELD after five years of martial law so it wasn’t a hard call to make. Besides, since the outbreak Asgard Shipping is the closest Sif’s got to family. Even if she didn’t like the job, it was worth it for that.

Her radio crackles as she rolls through the dark winter night. “Mjolnir, this is Asgard dispatch calling in, you copy?”

She picks up the receiver. “Asgard, I don’t know who Mjolnir is, but the good truck Swordhand copies.”

Loki cackles, and Sif can’t help but laugh at the sound. “So I see you're no longer working to make sure Thor likes you. Smart moves. Saves quite a lot of time, that.”

“That answer right there? That’s why Natasha dumped you.”

“Please. Don’t underestimate me. There are many reasons Natasha dumped me. Does your fiancé know you’ve renamed his baby?”

Sif grins at the thought of Thor’s face at her new paint job. She’d always told him she thought the hammer and lightning was tacky. “If he wanted to keep the name, then he should have kept the truck. But since he decided to opt for a better one—here we are.”

“Yes, where about is that?”

Sif peers at the odometer and the clock out of habit, but she’s spent the last two days keeping track of exactly how far she is from home. “About a hundred fifty kilometers east of you, along the SHIELD byway. The usual path had a pretty bad infestation.”

“You should have stayed on the main route. Zombie flesh will give you more traction than the byways coming up. And I know how happy killing zombies makes you.”

“Normally, yes, but Odin told me that if I want to run over zombies again, I got to clean the truck myself afterwards,” Sif says. “It’s less charming than you imagine.”

“I didn’t imagine it charming at all.

“Yeah, it’s even less charming than that. The weather’s looking bad then?”

“Particularly black and icy in about thirty kilometers time,” Loki says, his voice turning serious. “SHIELD’s sending out a general warning that the byways west of the Anchorage Line will be impassable.”

“You believe them?”

“I believe SHIELD doesn’t admit fallibility until the damage is long done. The Kingston Barrage Stop is about fifteen kilometers behind you. I’d recommend you hole up there tonight until we see what the conditions look like.”

Sif does the risk analysis and ignores the results. “I can handle ice driving.” This close to home, she can handle damn near anything. “If I die, tell a cool story about me at the funeral.”

“Your call,” Loki says. She can almost hear the shrug. As far as dispatchers go, Loki leaves most of the decisions in his driver’s hands, largely since he’s more interested in the radar work anyway. She always appreciated that about him. Sif doesn’t need anyone else telling her what she should or shouldn’t do. “Any preference?”

“Pick a bar fight.”

“Such a wealth of choices. Do try not to die. Your fiancé would have my head.”

Sif presses two fingers against the picture of Thor’s beaming face taped to the dash. “He always forgives you eventually.”

“Comforting. Again, do try not to die. Don’t be an idiot.”

“I’ll do what I can,” Sif says “but you know there’s no glory in pulling over.”

“I don’t know whether or not you’re joking.”

Neither does Sif. “I’ll see you by dawn.  Swordhand out.”

“I’m holding you to that. Asgard out.”

And then the car is silent again, silent and dark as the pitch black winter presses against her on all sides. Sif’s scared. She always is out here, with nothing but her skill and the world’s oldest truck keeping her safe. And though she can’t go telling people it, she loves the fear. Always has. This world suits her fine, this bleak and barren time she happens to live in, with the ever-present razor of terror pressed against her stomach. It makes her toes curl. It makes her kiss harder. It makes her turn the headlights off, just for one terrible moment, and the rush of pure black as the tires start to skid makes her want to sing.

                For example:

She dies on the mountaintop with an axe in her stomach and a smile on her face. This is how she dreams she’ll die. It seems almost a shame to earn such a perfect death and temper it with the knowledge that she’ll still have to keep dying imperfectly again and again and again and again and again and again.  Thor lies dead to her left. Loki lies dead to her right. That’s perfect too. They always come together in life, in every life. Proximity in death just feels symbolically apropos.

The science of it is quite simple if you think about it. We are matter. That is the beginning, the middle, and the end of our story. We are matter, and matter is atoms, and atoms form mass, and mass draws mass. Heavenly bodies orbit each other, the moons around the planets around the sun around the sky. Why should we be surprised that souls have orbits too? We are matter, and we are souls. The transitive property sorts the rest out. (Sif was a geometry teacher for sixth graders once. Loki taught English for the next grade up, and in their mutual free period he’d visit her room and read her choice bits from the particularly terrible essays he’d received this week. If they were still at school wrestling with some new torture of education’s bureaucratic hellscape when football practice was over, and they almost always were, Thor would jog up from the fields to join them with fresh coffee in hand. It was such a quiet life in retrospect. Sif doesn’t understand why she loves it so. Then again, that existence seemed as high-stakes and fraught with danger as any of the others. Any life does down in the thick of it.)

Sometimes they love each other. Sometimes they hate each other. Sometimes they nothing each other, just strangers who nod at each other as they pass on the street and think about the encounter for days. Sometimes one is everything to her and the other is shadows and dust. Sometimes one is family and the other a lover. Sometimes one is the choppy sea and the other the sturdy ground. Sometimes, sometimes, a billion different sometimes that all add up to always. They always find themselves together. There are planets with moons so large that the bodies orbit each other as they tumble through the abyss entwined. Why shouldn’t souls do the same?

The play is starting again. The curtains get ready to rise. All the players rush to memorize their cues. All they know is when they enter. The rest they figure out in the blinding lights. The world is ending, the world is beginning, the world is looping and curving and dropping, the world is plowing ahead. A straight line extended forever becomes a circle. If the atoms of the soul that once formed Sif had a stomach, it would be turning right now with the most delightful terror as she (metaphorically, as always) kisses her boys goodbye as one by one the stars turn on.

 


End file.
